sshd is the same version, installed in /usr/sbin/sshd. Now, things are a bit broken: I am able to ssh from another machine into my MacBook, so the server (sshd) is working, but the outgoing client (ssh) hangs indefinitely on connect. ssh-add also hangs on any operation. ssh-agent shows:

I removed *all installations* of OpenSSH from my system (both manually installed, and from port/MacPorts), rebooted, cleaned up any trace of ssh and sshd, then re-installed openssh using ports, which installs v5.0p_1. I restored my key files (public and private), authorized_keys, and known_hosts files to ~/.ssh, then tried to ssh into my own machine, which seems to be rejecting my key:

Well, you shouldn't encrypt your SSH private key or else you will have to put in the passphrase before the authentication can be completed - and apparently you're not being asked for the passphrase -- is this an SSH bug or was SSH never intended to use an encrypted private key?

The private key should be read/writable by the user ONLY. You can turn off the 'write' flag as well if you wish. The public key should only have 'read' permission for groups and others; as with the private key you can remove all write permissions.

Well, you shouldn't encrypt your SSH private key or else you will have to put in the passphrase before the authentication can be completed - and apparently you're not being asked for the passphrase -- is this an SSH bug or was SSH never intended to use an encrypted private key?

Unfortunately this is an option that is not up for discussion for me: my key *has* to be protected with a passphrase per guidelines at work. And I never had a problem with other versions of SSH before this.

The private key should be read/writable by the user ONLY. You can turn off the 'write' flag as well if you wish. The public key should only have 'read' permission for groups and others; as with the private key you can remove all write permissions.

Yup, permissions are fine.

Quote:

How are you generating your keys?

Using OpenSSH itself (ssh-keygen). In fact, I just tried generating new keys (both on this machine and on others), and they all return the same error.